


A Lot of Expectations

by zarabithia



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: M/M, Request Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 11:11:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky experiences his first pumpkin spice latte, courtesy of Clint's efforts to get into Bucky's pants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lot of Expectations

So Barnes wasn’t at all what Clint had expected, and having sat through nearly a decade of Captain America nostalgia trips that always featured The Sidekick as the starring attraction, Clint had expected a lot of things.

Mostly, to hear Steve tell it, Barnes was always the go-lucky, “cheese and crackers, Stevie, cheer up!” kind of dude. Sure, time spent as a brainwashed assassin would probably cure anybody of that, but all this brooding and angsting … even with Steve being -

Gone. Clint was going to go with gone, because Steve being gone hurt a lot less than Steve being dead. ‘Sides, Steve was going to come back any day. If somebody like Clint Barton could come back from the dead, Cap’s stubborn ass surely could.

Anyway, Steve being gone and the brainwashed assassin thing being taken into consideration, Clint still expected something a bit more … appropriate to the circus.

Then again, considering the people Clint’s circus had featured, Barnes might have fit right in. That was just wrong, for a guy who Steve thought was a saint.

“Yeah, but the brooding thing works for him,” Kate argued one day as they shared their first pumpkin spice lattes of the season. Kate also wasn’t anything at all like what Clint had envisioned when he’d learned that he’d suddenly developed a sidekick while he’d been dead. But she was absolutely everything that a Hawkeye should be, full of sass and disrespect and a healthy eye-roll towards authority. So, Rogers was apparently a lot better at picking out Clint’s sidekick than he had been at picking out his own.

Whatever, the point was that Clint totally enjoyed ringing in the first latte of the year with the other Hawkeye, even if Clint knew better than to actually call her a sidekick to her face.

“What do you mean, it works for him?” Clint demanded. “It doesn’t work for him. Not at all. It looks fucking ridiculous on him.”

Kate tapped ridiculous, overpriced fingerless gloves against her cup. “It looks pretty amazing on him and his leather jackets, actually. Like you haven’t noticed.”

“First of all, he is too old for you. Second of all, Bobbi and I - “

“Broke up again last week. I’m sure you’ll get back together. And break up again. I’m just saying that you should take advantage of your fluctuating off again relationship status to screw Bucky Barnes’ brains out.” Kate took an innocent drink of her latte. “It’s better than updating your status on Facebook. You know, being that we’re fugitives because Tony Stark fucked everything up so badly that they thought putting Norman Osborn in charge was a good idea, so updating your Facebook is probably a shitty idea, actually.”

“There is something so seriously wrong with you that you make Thor’s ideas of social interaction seem acceptable. And it took us five years to get Thor to stop throwing plates to express his need for more alcohol.”

“It’s funny you should bring up social interaction. You know what Bucky spends his whole time doing when he’s not dealing with The People He’s Obligated To Like Because Cap Loved Them?”

“Hey! No. He’s not dealing with us because he has to,” Clint protested, because really, that sounded terrible.

“He’s hunting down Hydra agents and punching old and not-so-old Nazis,” Kate continued, totally ignoring him. “He totally knew who my team was, so he’s probably spending his ‘fun’ time sitting around and reading up on superheroes and villains who have cropped up.”

“Is there a point to this, besides the fact that Barnes either needs to get laid or get better hobbies?”

“The point.” Kate sighed and put a ten dollar bill on the table of the really ridiculously ritzy headquarters that the Young Avengers shared. “Is that you should buy him a pumpkin spice latte on your way to introducing him to the Marvels of the twenty-first century - which may or may not include him getting laid.”

Clint did not need advice on his sex life from anyone. He certainly didn’t need advice from someone who thought carriage rides in the park were romantic.

Carriage rides in the park were not romantic.

But if the poor bastard really hadn’t ever had a pumpkin spice latte, that was just sad. What kind of life was that? So just this once, Clint took someone else’s advice on his sex life and bought the man a latte, even though it meant running the risk of running into Norman Osborn’s ridiculous Avengers to do so.

Okay, so never mind that Clint would have loved running into Osborn’s band of Merry Pretenders on the way to get Bucky’s latte.

Barnes was brooding over one of Cap’s old Mark Twain books, because Cap had really been that sad, that the man had liked and quoted Mark Twain. Repeatedly. God, it had been annoying.

God, Clint missed it.

“I brought you something,” he announced, before sitting the latte down in front of Barnes.

Barnes looked at the cup as though he were contemplating each of the poisons that Clint might have put in it. Which was ridiculous, because Clint was hardly a super spy.

But apparently he was as messed up as Kate was, because he kind of found the idea of Barnes checking his latte for poisons pretty hot.

“It won’t bite you, it’s not poisoned, and I know that Starbucks has a ridiculous logo, but quit looking at it like it might try to kill you and just try it.”

“I’ve had Starbucks before,” Barnes informed him. “Good way to waste coffee.”

“This is the last time I take Kate’s advice,” Clint sighed. Nine year olds shouldn’t give love advice, clearly.

He was never taking Bucky on a carriage ride anyway, dammit.

“Kate? Bishop? The other Hawkeye?” At Clint’s justifiable confusion that Barnes knew anything about Kate, Bucky clarified, “She bugged my bike once.”

“You are way too old for her.” Kate was perfect and she did not need Steve’s damaged sidekick fucking that up, thank you very much.

“That’s a … weird place to take the conversation,” Bucky informed him, which, okay, point. “She bugged my bike because she wanted to know where I was going.”

“Obviously.”

Barnes rolled his eyes, because when he wasn’t brooding, he was being a dick. Really, Clint needed a reminder about why he even wanted to fuck this guy in the first place.

“Hey, I’ve killed people for bugging my bike,” Bucky pointed out, and then he must have realized how truly awful that sounded, because he hastily amended, “I don’t plan on killing Kate Bishop.”

“I’m thinking maybe I should have put some arsenic in that latte, after all.”

Barnes smirked and peeled off the cup’s lid. “I was going to say that if it was Miss Bishop’s idea, it couldn’t be a terrible one, but like hell. There’s no way anything this color was meant to go into anyone’s body.”

“You are old. So old. You are exactly the old man I used to tease Steve about being.” Clint knew that he’d crossed some sort of line by bringing up Steve’s name, so he figured he might as well keep on going right past that line. “Steve liked them, you know.”

Bucky looked up from sneering down at the contents of his cup long enough to glare at Clint. “Bullshit. Steve had better taste.”

“Every fall since they started making them, he’d always come back with one during the first week of business. The fact that Tony was at all scornful about this fact was probably our first sign that he was headed towards supervillainy,” Clint retorted, and yes, it was petty that he felt victorious about knowing that one aspect of Steve’s life that Barnes hadn’t been part of. He felt badly about that pettiness, but not so badly that he didn’t add, “And sometimes, he’d have them with s’mores, but you really haven’t earned that privilege yet.”

“Save that for second date material, do you?”

“Fuck you, too, Barnes, you are failing your way right through the first date.”

“Wouldn’t want that, would we? I have a feeling that Miss Bishop would be disappointed in both of us.” Bucky gave the latte another disdainful look before taking a sip.

Clint waited not so patiently. Sure, he wanted in Barnes’ pants, but Clint was pretty sure that there had to be a line drawn in the sand about pumpkin spice lattes and people who didn’t like them. Even in Clint’s fucked up love life, he had to draw that line, right?

Well, probably not. But fortunately, Clint didn’t have to test that theory, because Barnes’ disdain soon turned to the appropriate look of orgasmic bliss that one should have when drinking pumpkin spice lattes.

“That is … amazing,” Barnes admitted, and Clint was ready and eager to gloat about the fact that he knew that already - and maybe buy Kate one for her advice, which had turned out to be stunningly awesome for someone who thought carriage parks in the park were romantic. But then Barnes made a face that was all soft and mushy and nostalgic. Clint knew about the last part, because Steve had made the same kind of face often.

And Clint wasn’t the man who had taken such great delight in twisting the knife ever so much more sharply at the first sign of that nostalgia face anymore.

“There is a reason that they are tradition in this century,” Clint offered instead, because he was getting soft.

“I haven’t tasted anything that good since Steve and I shared …" Barnes trailed off, locking up whatever he was going to say back in the old vault of memories that he didn’t feel as inclined to share nearly as easily as Steve had, before Steve had … left. “Miss  
Bishop certainly has good taste.”

“You’re still too old for her,” Clint said firmly, because it was better and less possessive than “quit complimenting Katie when I’m the one who is trying to get in your pants.”

“So you’ve mentioned.” Barnes took another sip of his drink, and okay, Clint couldn’t judge him for taking that long to finish that sip, because they were talking about a pumpkin spice latte. “Besides, I thought this ridiculously good drink was your attempt at a first date?”

“Something like that, and since you stopped fucking it up so badly, you might even earn a second one.”

“Maybe we should see where this one goes first.” Bucky didn’t have fingerless gloves, but he did have ridiculous leather gloves that matched his ridiculous leather jacket, and they looked almost as silly wrapped around the Starbucks’ cup as Kate’s fingerless gloves had.

“I thought you were impressed by Kate’s offering, Barnes.”

“Oh, I am. But as good as this drink is, if you want to earn a second date, I need a little bit more.” That smirk didn’t belong on anyone Steve had viewed as a goddamn saint. “It’s a pretty tall order, though. Think you’re up to the challenge?”

“A challenge to be better than a fake coffee?”

“A really good fake coffee.”

That was true enough. Still, “By the end of the night, that fake coffee is going to be the last thing on your mind.”

“Just so you are aware, if you do make it to the second date, Miss Bishop has already introduced me to s’mores, so you’ll have to come up with something else.”

Barnes leaned back in his chair, took a drink of his latte with one hand, and gestured at Clint in a universal sign that pretty much meant, “Bring it” to anyone living on this side of World War II.

Oh, Clint could definitely work with that, even if it wasn’t what he’d expected.


End file.
